Dr. Sven Panis

Sven Panis is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Professorship for Social Brain Sciences. He completed a BA and MA in Psychology at KU Leuven (Belgium), and received a doctoral degree in Experimental Psychology from the University of Leuven, in 2008.

He worked as a Principal Investigator on an FWO-Flanders research grant (Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek) at the University of Leuven from 2009 to 2012. From 2014 to 2019, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the research group of Prof. Dr. Thomas Schmidt at the Center of Cognitive Science at the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. From 2019 to 2022, he raised a DFG grant to fund his own position as a Principal Investigator (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).

Sven’s research interests include object recognition, cognitive control, attentional selection, and dynamic field theory. His current major focus is studying the time-varying behavior displayed by people in various standard cognitive paradigms using hazard analysis, and how this behavior constrains theory development. His methods comprise behavioral methods, fMRI, and the microanalysis of response time distributions (survival or event history analysis).

In his free time, Sven enjoys cycling, walking, and playing guitar.